Last Modified

• March 21, 2019

Creator

• Greaves, Brendan
  • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of American Studies, Folklore Program

Abstract

• Little is known about enigmatic Cuban American cigarmaker and artist Felipe Jesus Consalvos (1891-c. 1960), whose over 800 collages were discovered at a West Philadelphia garage sale in 1983. By employing diverse disciplinary and critical tools, this thesis examines Consalvos's collage practice by speculatively tracking its orbit within a constellation of enmeshed contexts: the radical sociopolitical world of Cuban American tabaqueros; the fraught history of U.S.-Cuban relations and associated processes of cultural appropriation and hybridization; the rise of collage as a recursive development within both vernacular and elite or academic expressive culture; Consalvos's potential positioning within the aligned discourses of contemporaneous Euro-American modernist art and poetry (especially Dada, Surrealism, and Pop); the artist's self-declared role as healer; and the machinations of the contemporary North American art market. Essentialist notions of the vernacular, the modern, and the authentic interpenetrate and collapse upon a close analysis of his compelling, unclassifiable collages.

Date of publication

• May 2008

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.17615/0v10-yq15

Resource type

• Masters Thesis

Rights statement

• In Copyright

Advisor

• Hinson, Glenn

Language

• English

Access

• Open access

Parents:

This work has no parents.

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	Dream the rest : on the mystery and vernacular modernism of Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Cubamerican cigarmaker, creator, healer, & man	2019-04-10	Public	Press to Select an action Download